


Keeping Up With The Joneses

by Cameron_McKell



Series: Upon Further Review [11]
Category: Tron (1982), Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Legacy (2010), Tron: The Next Day (2011)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Insults, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Pranks and Practical Jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2013-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-27 01:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/972711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cameron_McKell/pseuds/Cameron_McKell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alan gets revenge, with Tron's help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Up With The Joneses

“Morning, Alan.”

 

With his car keys – and freedom – just inches from the lock, Alan ducked his head a little and held in the urge to groan. He took a moment to get himself under control, then forced a smile on his face, and turned toward his neighbor.

 

“Good morning, Adam.”

 

Adam Prestwich showed his teeth in something that was just a little too hostile to be called a smile, and leaned slightly over their shared fence. He was dressed in one of those ‘ostentatious but pretending not to be’ jogging suits, skin and hair slightly damp with sweat; the whole getup seemed perfectly tailored to make Alan feel old and lazy, never mind that he worked considerably earlier in the day than his neighbor, and couldn’t really afford to exercise before work.

 

He exercised after work, and if he happened to have his own – more dignified – exercise getup, and made a _little_ point of how much more, and longer he ran than Adam, well, that was just coincidence.

 

“Is that a new car?” On cue, Adam started in on the daily routine of the two of them one-upping each other until someone surrendered and insisted they had to go.

 

“It’s a new addition to the company pool; my usual car’s in the shop right now,” Alan kept his voice casual, even as he emphasized that he held a position of importance in a well-to-do company.

 

Prestwich made a show of looking the car over with a low ‘appreciative’ whistle, and ran a hand through his sweaty hair; this was a low blow, as Adam used the gesture to draw attention to the fact that his hair was only starting to gray, and implied that Alan was old, “What happened to your old car?” He pointedly glanced up at this, staring fairly obviously at Alan’s glasses.

 

Alan felt his hand clench into a fist around his keys; he had to come up with something good to get back at the implication that he crashed the car, because he couldn’t see well. He’d never been ashamed to wear glasses – even though he now cringed a little inside when he thought of the styles that had been popular back in the 70s and 80s – and he wasn’t about to let Adam ‘20/ _15’_ Prestwich make him start. “It’s just getting its scheduled maintenance done,” here, he threw in a glance at the not-exactly-small oil stain in his neighbor’s driveway, driving in the point of ‘I take care of my things, unlike _some_ people’, “I noticed it was starting to sound a little off when I was out shopping for groceries and decorations for next Thursday.” He gestured back to some of the Thanksgiving decorations by his door, and had never been more pleased with his decision to hold off on any more ‘wintry’ decorations until the Saturday after the holiday; it showcased his larger family, while simultaneously making Adam look tacky for jumping the gun and skipping straight to snowmen, reindeer, and lights strategically placed to shine right into Alan’s bedroom window, which would matter more if Alan hadn’t bought light-blocking curtains years ago.

 

The only real downside to it was that he always ended up playing catch up with the other decorations; maybe he could enlist Quorra this year to help him, considering how enthusiastic she’d been about Halloween.

 

“Oh, is _Lora_ coming in to town?” Adam went for the jugular, Alan saw red, and the rest of the conversation was doomed to follow a far too familiar pattern. The sheer magnitude of insinuations that Prestwich the lifelong bachelor could put into a sentence like that – that Alan’s marriage was in trouble, that it was dysfunctional, that Lora was cheating on him, that _he_ was cheating on _her,_ that she resented ‘making time’ for him, that he was bad in bed and had somehow driven her away, even sometimes that the whole thing was _imaginary,_ and so on – always drove Alan right to the point of violence; if he wanted to avoid being arrested for assault or murder, he’d have to give in and retreat this morning.

 

Not without a parting shot, though.

 

“ _Everyone_ is coming in for it, for the first time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my house as packed as it’s going to be,” he offered as a last jab, pointing out that he had amassed a family, while Adam was alone, then gave in and glanced at his watch. “I really should get going to work now; traffic’s always terrible this time of day.” He tried to ignore the decidedly victorious smile his neighbor was now sporting, and slid his key into the lock. He waved as he ducked inside the car to the sounds of Adam’s farewell, and proceeded to back out onto the street a little more forcefully than necessary.

 

Stupid Adam Prestwich and his stupid, probably dyed hair; just once, he wanted to completely pull one over on the man. Trying to distract himself from driving angry – it tended to cause more stress, more accidents, and more trips to the gas pump – he mentally plotted out Thanksgiving dinner again. He needed to get the turkey out to thaw soon, Roy hated celery, Sam _loved_ cranberry sauce, he had the marshmallows for Lora but not the yams – even though no one else liked those, Quorra had decided she was going to make a pie, and Alan was curious to see how she’d do, as long as she remembered his nut allergy and didn’t make pecan pie, and –

 

Oh.

 

Smirking rather evilly at the red light, he hit speed dial three on his hands-free.

 

The sound of ringing filled the car for a moment, then a voice still fogged with sleep, “Hello?”

 

“Hey, Sam,” he greeted, trying to keep his tone conversational, and not like a gleeful child planning revenge, even if he sort of felt like one, “I was wondering, when was the next time Tron was visiting?” Hopefully he was coming at least once before next Thursday; Lora might not approve of his plan.

 

Then again, Lora could sometimes be rather mischievous.

 

“Huh? Oh. I was going to go in for the weekend, then he was going to come out for Monday, then Thanksgiving. Why?” Sam gave a jaw-cracking yawn over the line, and Alan inwardly crowed with triumph.

 

“Could you ask him to call me when he has a moment, when the two of you get in Sunday night? I had a favor to ask him.”

 

He could practically see the curious look Sam shot at his phone, before putting it back to his ear, “Um. Yeah, sure.”

 

“Perfect. Thanks, Sam.”

 

“No problem.”

 

This was going to be _good._

 

* * *

 

“Do you remember what to do?”

 

Tron nodded hesitantly while Alan smoothed his black trench coat over his shoulders; it fit slightly different in the back over his empty disk dock, but not in any noticeable way. He could tell only because he’d watched the program put it on. Tron had refused to leave his disks with Alan, so they were fused together and sandwiched between Alan’s paperwork in his briefcase; it had nothing to do with not trusting them to Alan’s safekeeping – the idea was preposterous to both of them – and everything to do with the comfort of having his best means of self-defense close at hand.

 

Considering the favor he was doing for Alan, he wasn’t going to begrudge Tron his sense of security.

 

“Let’s see, you’ve got my keys, my briefcase – oh! Tie. Has Sam showed you a Windsor knot yet? Nevermind, I can do it, just lean forward and tilt your head up a little.” Tron swayed almost drunkenly as he complied, and Alan grabbed hold of the tie around his neck to help steady him.

 

It was an odd sort of reaction, and Alan was about to ask about it, when he saw the culprit up close; Tron’s eyes were dilating wildly behind Alan’s glasses on his face – Alan himself was currently going without, something he tended to do less and less as he got older, but still managed just fine – trying to adjust to seeing through Alan’s prescription. For all his acrobatic grace, Tron technically had no sense of balance – he had no inner ear to speak of – instead relying on his various inputs, scans, and sensors to place himself within the system. A lot of that didn’t work in the User world, so he apparently relied mostly on touch and sight to orient himself; unfortunately the lenses of Alan’s glasses were sending him conflicting results.

 

Alan was guiltily tempted to call the whole thing off, and had just opened his mouth to do so when Tron’s eyes, and his entire being, settled down, having finally compensated for the adjustments to his visual input. Alan closed his mouth on a smile, and busied himself tying the tie around his neck; it was a little odd, doing something to someone else that he usually only did to himself, but he managed all right.

 

Finished, Alan took a few steps back to take in the full effect.

 

The resemblance was so uncanny it was almost eerie: Tron was dressed straight from Alan’s work closet, from coat to shoes to glasses. The only addition he’d made was an undershirt of heavy white cotton, to keep the black of his gridsuit and the glow of his circuitry from showing through the white dress shirt. The warm-colored, low light conditions of evening obscured the slight differences between Tron and himself from thirty years ago, and he was _absolutely_ not going to think about that fact and Sam’s relationship with Tron at the same time, because that way lay madness.

 

Forcibly shaking the thought from his mind, he pulled out a comb, and fixed Tron’s hair – he parted it slightly differently, in that he didn’t especially bother to part it at all, because what function did vanity serve? – then nodded toward the car, “Okay, you’re ready to go.”

 

Tron gave Alan’s car an uncertain look, and the expression was so foreign on him it was almost funny; give him a vehicle on the Grid, and he was a recklessly brilliant maniac, put him in the passenger seat and he was perfectly calm, on-system and off-, but ask him to _drive_ something in the User world, and he turned into this program-shaped ball of nerves. The most anyone had managed to get Tron to say on the subject was some evasion about ‘insufficient privileges’.

 

Alan always figured he was worried about breaking other people’s things.

 

… Though, considering how many light cycles, jets, tanks, and Recognizers Tron tended to go through, maybe it was a valid concern.

 

While he was busy mentally critiquing Tron’s driving technique, the program in question had seated himself in the car and buckled up. He took a moment to double-check mirror placement, then looked over at Alan, and Alan mentally shoved himself back into the present. Oh-so-satisfying prank first, woolgathering later.

 

Tron smirked at having caught Alan spacing out, then gestured toward the path Alan had planned out for himself through backyards so he could play witness to the prank; it wouldn’t be very satisfying if he couldn’t see it, after all. “You should get going so you’re in place by the time I get there.”

 

He fully intended to ask for a copy of Tron’s first-person perspective of the whole thing once it’d been synced onto his disks.

 

He nodded and offered a quick ‘Good luck’, then skulked off through Mrs. Goldman’s roses.

 

Realistically, he knew the whole thing was petty and silly, but he hadn’t been this excited over something so pointless in ages; it was refreshing.

 

And if ducking out of the way of lights, and creeping under kitchen windows toward his own home made him feel like a rebel or a spy, well, no one else needed to know.

 

He understood a little better now, why Sam always seemed to enjoy pulling pranks on ENCOM so much, though.

 

He settled in to wait just behind the large shrub at the front corner of his house – and made a note to himself to trim it a little before everyone came over – just in time to watch Tron drive in from the other direction – purposefully past Adam’s house – and cut the engine.

 

Seeing as ‘Alan’ was coming home unusually late, Adam was already on his way over to the fence before Tron had picked the briefcase up off the front passenger seat. “You’re home awful late tonight, Alan; did that Boy Wonder boss of yours keep you late at the office?” Already he was starting in with the jabs about ‘a kid’ running the company he’d struggled to run when he was in charge?

 

“Hey, Adam,” Tron replied in a pitch-perfect imitation of Alan’s own speech patterns, hunting around for the briefcase in the foot well; having an expansive video library as part of your memory definitely had its advantages. “No, I finished up early today, and figured I’d get a little work done before everyone came to visit.”

 

“Yeah? What sort of work? Anything important?” Adam asked, resting his folded arms along the top of the fence, deceptively polite for all that Tron had just – probably accidentally, though he _had_ been rather upset to hear some of what Adam had said in the past – just implied that Adam was a slacker with the way he’d worded that comment.

 

“I just figured I’d get a bit of touching up done; I haven’t seen some of the people coming in years.” Never let it be said that Tron had bad timing, because he chose that moment to straighten up from the car, and flash the ‘well-preserved’ Mr. Prestwich one of Alan’s own signature smiles, “What do you think?”

 

The look on Adam Prestwich’s face at the sight of Tron was something that Alan was going to treasure, forever.

 

He was going to have to think of something _truly_ _exceptional_ to thank Tron with, because this…

 

This was _beautiful._


End file.
